More Stories You Didn't See on FOX News Last Week

News Hounds Guest Blogger Bill Corcoran has let us all know just what important military news FOX managed to overlook last week. Now, it's time for a list of just a few of the other stories you didn't see covered by FOX News Channel's "hard-hitting, hard news" shows.

NATIONAL I.D. CARD AND THE IMMIGRATION BILL
Did you know that embedded in the 800 pages of the Immigration Bill is a requirement for a national workers' I.D. card? I didn't until I happened to catch a Chris Matthews segment on MSNBC. Here's what the ACLU has to say about it:

"The proposed legislation would require every job applicant in America to have their eligibility to work verified by the DHS, using the error-plagued Employment Eligibility Verification System (EEVS). EEVS creates a massive government database containing extraordinary amounts of personal information on everyone in America, tied to each individual’s Social Security number. If DHS makes a mistake in determining work eligibility, there will be virtually no way to challenge the error or recover lost wages due to the bill’s prohibitions on judicial review.

"As a part of EEVS, every person in America would be forced to carry a hardened Social Security card perhaps containing biometric information about the cardholder - essentially a national ID - and present a Real ID-compliant driver’s license to get any new job. The proposed legislation also expands current practice of expedited removal. The ACLU noted that these policies do nothing to solve the problems of illegal immigration and violate the fundamental American value of due process."

VENEZUELAN STUDENT PROTESTS
Boy, was this ever a huuuuuge story on FOX News a couple of weeks ago, complete with impassioned tearful statements from Maria Conchita Alonso and much anti-Chavez ranting from FNC hosts. Now that evidence has surfaced that shows that the protests were carefully staged as a media-driven event by political groups opposed to Chavez, FOX News has dropped all of its coverage.

According to a report for Counterpunch filed by George Ciccariello-Maher, a Ph.D. candidate who lives in Caracas, the students who protested represented a mere 3% of the 200,000 students who could have shown up. Additionally, something that FOX News never mentioned in its coverage is that Chavez has been creating state-funded universities that will directly compete with the Venezuelan private universities. One wonders how FOX News got itself mixed up in this whole mess?

From Counterpunch:

That the "student leaders" are tied to the opposition is far from controversial: for example, spokesperson Yon Goicochea is a member of Primero Justicia and the aptly-named Stalin González belonged until recently to the strangest of opposition organizations, Bandera Roja. BR is a nominally Marxist-Leninist group which made the unlikely transition from a respectable guerrilla organization to the attack dogs of the far right, claiming to use the opposition as a vehicle to topple the fake communism of Chávez and institute a true dictatorship of the proletariat. But González recently revealed the extent of his opportunism by joining Rosales and Un Nuevo Tiempo.

But the contours of the opposition's hands-off strategy wouldn't be fully clear until the revelation of a taped phone conversation in which Un Nuevo Tiempo leader Alfonso Marquina spoke of the need to remain in the background, but to pull the strings regardless: "Let's mobilize all the kids We have a strategy as an organization Let's mobilize all the kids, because you know [UCV student leader] Stalin [González] is our vice president here in Caracas Let's mobilize the kids from the Catholic [University] We've decided that the politicians won't intervene, that we'll leave it to the kids in their natural environment. We'll give them support, stick them in trucks If I go out there, they'll say it's the politicians that are calling the kids out"

"The only thing that can save us in this situation is if something extraordinary happens," replies Elías, an advisor to RCTV head Marcel Granier, on the leaked tape. It's comments like this that lead the Vice President of the National Assembly Desiree Santos to argue that the political opposition to Chávez was "looking for a death" among the students, to "repeat the actions of 2002" in which pre-meditated deaths were inserted into a pre-fabricated media strategy to overthrow Chávez.

LEBANESE ARMY ATTACKS ON THE NAHR AL-BARED CAMP
Here's another story FOX News couldn't get enough of. We were treated to "night vision" shots of the massive Lebanese Army shelling of thousands of Palestinians trapped in a camp in Tripoli, Lebanon. Well, what happened? Those attacks are still going on with two Red Cross workers having just been killed, but you wouldn't know that if you watched the FOX News Channel.

BEIRUT, 12 June 2007 (IRIN) - Aid agencies pledged to continue efforts to deliver relief and evacuate the injured from the besieged Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in north Lebanon despite an upsurge in fighting.

The deadly 24-day-old conflict between the army and Islamist militants saw two volunteer Red Cross workers killed on 11 June.

“Nothing is going to change. Yesterday [11 June] we continued our work as usual,” Ghaleb Ayoubi, head of the communications department at the Lebanese Red Cross (LRC) told IRIN. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) also pledged to continue working with its partners to deliver relief to the besieged camp.

DECREASING BIRD POPULATIONS
While FOX News will issue a news alert every time any "important" person denies global warming, they ignore many stories (like the one that follows) that describe the effects of human encroachment on the environment . The Boston Globe reported about a Nationbal Audubon study showing that common bird populations have decreased drastically in the past 40 years. This is not good news, as birds are an integral part of the ecosystem.

The United States has seen an alarming decline in common birds over the past 40 years, due to the loss of habitat from suburban sprawl and expansion of commercial agriculture as well as more recent effects from global warming, according to a National Audubon Society study released today.

In Massachusetts, several birds seen regularly three or four decades ago, such as the Northern bobwhite and the Eastern meadowlark, have now become extremely rare, according to the study. Human encroachment on their habitat -- grasslands and shrubs -- has vastly diminished their populations and altered the avian pecking order over the decades, according to annual bird counts.